blackcat

Nobody knows?

Hi everyone, Just (finally) moving from XP to Win7. I've always installed Windows unattended, setting unattended.txt so that the entire OS is installed under c:\Win (or whatever other root I choose in the SIF), ie. there are no other folders created in the root dir, and profiles, program files, etc are all inside c:\Win. I like it this way because it keeps things clean, and I can have multiple Windows installations in my system partition (eg. just change the SIF to point to c:\Win2 for the second installation), which often comes in handy. But I can't see a way to do this in unattended.xml for Win 7. Is it even possible to install Windows 7 to something other than c:\Windows ?

Thanks for the pointer. I checked it out but that seems to be more to do with reducing the size of the installation and doing custom actions along the way - my problem is to make XPInstall get different info from its standard config files depending on the PC that it is being installed on. I think I've found a reasonable solution though - winnt.exe and winnt32.exe let you specify the location of the winnt.sif file on the command line, so I could have (say) a boot floppy which asks which PC is being installed, updates a winnt.sif on the floppy accordingly, then runs winnt.exe (from the cd) to install. If I wanted to be really clever (and waste a lot of time!) I could write a "mass storage device driver" which could be loaded by pressing F8 right at the start of setup. The real purpose of this driver would be to install itself as a file system filter and dynamically modify what XP Install reads from winnt.sif (on CD) based on which PC it was. Or it could achieve the same thing by creating a RAMDisk, writing an appropriate winnt.sif to it, and (somehow) forcing setup to use that even though the opportunity to specify the location of a winnt.sif on the command line has already passed by that time. Either would let the whole thing work from a single CD (no boot floppy) and all in read-only mode, which is what I'd like to do.

Hello all, Is there a standard way to prepare a single unattended install CD that can be used on multiple PCs, each of which would want different values in some of the winnt.sif (etc) config files? I'd have thought that this would be quite a common thing to want to do, but finding any clues on how to do it is not easy Cheers, BC

Bear in mind that you dont always have to change the registry - you can often achieve the same thing (changing the locations of things) using file system capabilities if you are using NTFS on your boot partition. For example say you have a drive D: where you want your profile to be stored directly under a folder "MYPROFILE", and your username is MYUSERNAME. Then you could: 1) reboot Windows and log on as another user (so your profile is not being touched) 2) move your profile directory from its default location (C:\D&S\MYUSERNAME) to D:\MYPROFILE 3) Set C:\D&S\MYPROFILENAME as an NTFS junction/mount point/<whatever you want to call it> pointing to D:\MYPROFILE. If you're not familar with what this means and how to do it, a quick Google will tell you everything you need to know. 4) logon as MYUSERNAME (no need to reboot) - your profile is now being used from its alternate location. Of course you can do this for any folder in isolation (such as a subfolder of your profiles tree, as you originally asked). What's nice about this method is that your profile data still looks to Windows like it is at its normal location, so it works with no registry changes and still gets backed up when you back up your system drive.